Category: media

As you previously read, a new Star Trek TV series of some sort is coming to CBS’ new streaming service.

I decided after noticing the length of the earlier post (about the same time as it takes for the Enterprise to get toward the Andromeda galaxy, even with the Kelvans and most of the crew reduced to tetrahedrons) that my thoughts about the next Star Trek should go into another post.

(That, and reading the Washington Post’s post’s comments, which included the unwelcome insertion of politics along with this idiocy: “I’m one to eye-roll at runaway progressivism in 2015 but it’s right at home in Star Trek. In fact, getting rid of firm genders (both physiological and psychological) all together would be a very interesting facet of the future.” The second part of that statement seems to the first assertion.)

What many people with a Star Trek opinion appear to forget is this: This is a TV series viewed by early 21st century people. The original had a ’60s sensibility because … guess what? It was written and performed by late ’60s human beings! Even if Trekkies, or Trekkers, or those who watch Star Trek are more, shall we say, utopian than the median, there are some things that will not cut it in the early 21st century. (See the idiotic statement about gender one paragraph ago.)

There is a valid argument for the Post’s post’s position of setting the new series in the mid-22nd century. Given the connection long-time Trek viewers have to the existing characters (even if it’s impossible to bring them back because the actors are dead), redoing one of the five series seems likely only to alienate Trek fans while not necessarily bringing in new fans. That means a new ship, probably, and definitely new characters. Whatever problems the successors to The Original Series have had, they weren’t really tied to the existence of new characters.

Going to the mid-22nd century, which is the setting of the last Star Trek series, “Enterprise,” would, from what I read online (and yes, we are talking about events written in the past about one or more centuries from now), be about the time the earliest iteration of Starfleet encountered both the Klingons and the Romulans.

The other thing going to the 22nd century would do is get the new series past the excessive utopianism of The Next Generation. That includes, but is not limited to, economics. Jonathan Newman points out:

With the recent successes and announcements of sci-fi movies and TV shows like The Martian, Interstellar, and new incarnations of Star Trek and Star Wars, no one can deny that we crave futurism and stretching our imagination on what advanced technology can accomplish. Many look to the example of these fictional worlds as an indication of what life might be like when technology can provide for all of our basic needs, a condition some call “post-scarcity.”

The same people call on dramatic government interventions to make sure everybody can earn a “living wage” when robots and automation do all of the producing. They say that “post-scarcity” conditions will completely overturn economies and even economics itself.

But, scarcity can never be eliminated because our infinite human wants will always outnumber the means available in this finite universe. Scarcity is found even in the shows and movies that supposedly represent worlds without scarcity.

A prime example of what is meant by “post-scarcity” and its contrast to present-day is presented in theStar Trek: The Next Generation series.

In the final episode of the first season, the Enterprise happens upon an “ancient” vessel floating through space. Lt. Commander Data and Security Officer Worf find three humans from Earth, frozen in cryonic chambers for 400 years, which gives the twenty-fourth century crew a chance to interact with people from the viewers’ time period.

One of these late twentieth-century humans, Ralph Offenhouse, was preoccupied with regaining control over what he expected to be a gigantic fortune from a 400-year-old stock portfolio. Indeed, one of the first things he asked for after being thawed and resuscitated was a copy of the Wall Street Journal.

Captain Picard informed him that “A lot has changed in the past three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy.”

The show paints a Marxist picture of how humans arrived at being able to warp across space with food replicators and beaming devices and all sorts of technology that renders even our early twenty-first-century scramble for scarce resources a mere curiosity.

During centuries that stretch between the crew of the Enterprise and their time capsule visitors, technology changed in such a way to abundantly provide for people’s material needs. Therefore human society phased out of capitalism and trade and into socialism, which Karl Marx predicted in his theory of history. …

Unfortunately for all of us, however, scarcity isn’t going anywhere. And the only way to maximize human want satisfaction with a limited pool of resources is with unhampered markets: private property and prices. Scarcity is a fundamental fact of our universe — we are bound to it by physical laws and logic.

Scarcity is even present in the fictional Star Trek universe, as well as self-ownership and private property. In the very same episode, Captain Picard and the crew have a tense confrontation with the Romulans, who have invaded Federation space. Both parties were investigating the destruction of some of their outposts in the “Neutral Zone.” Space is not only the final frontier, but apparently ownable. The Romulan and Federation outposts are also scarce and owned.

When Ralph Offenhouse wandered onto the main bridge during this confrontation, Captain Picard ordered security officers to “Get him off my bridge!”

We can’t even conceive of a fictional universe with no scarcity. There can be no time, space, or anything that has any limited capabilities in satisfying our desires. Such a universe would be timeless, incorporeal, and all satisfying. It’s hard to imagine a TV show based in such a universe because there could be no conflict for the characters to overcome.

What Manu Saadia and Noah Smith mean by “post-scarcity,” then, is just that some things are more abundant than before. But this prospect does not mean the end of economics, because even today many goods are more abundant than they have been in the past.

No matter what, individuals will still be making choices about how to use the resources that are scarce. We may make things relatively less scarce, but we can never repeal scarcity as a fundamental condition of our universe.

Suppose every household in the world has all of their biological needs abundantly satisfied. Food is provided by replicators like those on the Enterprise. Everybody has as at least as much shelter as they need. Super-medicines and all health services are easily provided with the touch of a button in your own home.

All this means is that people can pursue other ends besides survival, like art, entertainment, learning, or simple relaxation. Our demand for goods and services does not stop once we are at subsistence levels of consumption. This is obviously true for anybody with the means to read this article.

Also, there may be demand for food and other goods specifically made by human hands even when robots or replicators could have made something identical or more precisely machined at a lower cost. We see this today, and we are far from Star Trek.

Sometimes we like knowing something was made in a certain way, and this translates into demand for goods with a specific, usually labor-intensive, production process. Craft and hand-made trade fairs are common, even when many of the items offered are mass-produced elsewhere.

Toward the end of the episode, when Ralph Offenhouse is reeling in an existential crisis, he asks Captain Picard about the purpose of twenty-fourth-century life if it’s not “accumulating wealth”:

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Material needs no longer exist.
Ralph Offenhouse: Then what’s the challenge?
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: The challenge, Mr. Offenhouse, is to improve yourself. To enrich yourself. Enjoy it.

What Picard doesn’t realize is that improving and enriching yourself, even with the Enterprise’s mission: “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before” involves the use of scarce, material resources, like starships, starship crews, planets to explore, communicators, teleportation machines, phasers, and warp drives.

Picard also doesn’t realize how wealthy he is. Wealth is the ability to satisfy ends, and his spot on theEnterprise makes him enormously wealthy, with all the replicators and the holodeck (environment simulator) and the instant access to top-notch medical care. For someone who rejects accumulating wealth, he has accumulated a lot of it.

Although biological needs may be abundantly satisfied, human desires outnumber the stars.

Even the Enterprise demonstrates scarcity. Robert P. Murphy demonstrates from episodes:

For example, in “The Galileo Seven,” Spock must make difficult command decisions when the shuttlecraft is stranded on a planet. Yet, the suspense in the episode derives from Galactic High Commissioner Ferris bickering with Kirk over how long they should continue searching for the landing party while the plague-ridden people of Makus III await the medical supplies the Enterprise is delivering. There is obvious conflict because of the trade-off involved: despite the wonderful ship at his command, Kirk (it seems) must choose between his stranded friend and the planet of sick strangers.

Indeed, even though the opening sequence of each episode mentions seeking out new life and civilizations, and of course “to boldly go where no man has gone before,” the Enterprisequite often is tasked with delivering physical supplies to various people. The famous episode, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” with the white/black-faced men, involved a medical mission to decontaminate a planet. In the Next Generation series, the memorable episode “Brothers” involved Lieutenant Commander Data seizing control of the Enterprise when he is summoned by his creator. The situation is dire because a very sick child (accidentally placed in his predicament by his brother) cannot be cured of a parasite while on the Enterprise, and time is running out.

So we see that it is a common theme in Star Trek for people to argue over how the ship should be used, and often people will die from illness depending on whose will prevails. Whether they have a 24th-century version of Obamacare is irrelevant; there is definitely scarcity there, and it operates just like scarcity today.

Even the technology in the Star Trek universe is not a given; it is a response to incentives. For example, in the episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” the crew goes into a different timeline where Lieutenant Tasha Yar is still alive (she had been killed off in the first season when the actress asked to be let out of her contract). In this timeline, the Federation has been at war with the Klingons all along. At one point, Yar says, “Deflector shield technology has advanced considerably during the war. Our heat dissipation rates are probably double those of the Enterprise-C, which means we can hang in a firefight a lot longer.” Thus we see that the capabilities of the Enterprise-D — the ship commanded by Jean-Luc Picard — are themselves dependent on the preferences of the humans who own it and the associated resources.

Economics is one problem, but not the only one, with Star Trek from TNG onward. The TNG producers apparently were convinced by Roddenberry, or something, that there would be no interpersonal conflict either. That is more ridiculous than Trekonomics, for two reasons. First, it’s bad for stories. TOS featured plenty of conflict between Spock and McCoy, or between Kirk and an episode’s antagonists. The Enterprise crew was professional enough to not let the vagaries of interpersonal relations affect ship operations. (As it is, TNG, Deep Space Nine and Voyager had to import conflict from the aliens our heroes encountered.) And, obviously, if humans haven’t really changed in thousands to millions of years (depending on your views of evolution), they’re not going to change significantly in 300 years. (More than the bad economics, the moral preening of many TNG episodes made that series subpar to TOS.)

The problem with setting the new Star Trek in the early Klingon/Romulan conflict days is that it runs the risk of making the series too similar to the rebooted (and hated by Trek fans) movies, which are derided as shoot-em-ups with phasers. Independent of screwing around with what the characters should be like (Kirk was not an immature punk in TOS, and Spock was not unable to control his emotions), the science fiction in the reboot has consisted only of gadgets in the hands of the bad guys (“red matter” in the first movie and the Dreadnought in the second). No exploration, no discovery, no commentary on the human condition.

Two things make any TV series worth watching, or not — characters and stories. One facet of TOS I liked, but was used far too infrequently, was the byplay between Lt. Sulu and Ensign Chekov, who sat next to each other on the bridge. In “Amok Time” they commented on setting, and then unsetting, and then setting again course to Vulcan. In “The Deadly Years” Chekov complains about undergoing every possible medical test because he’s not aging while the rest of the landing party is. It was like watching Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in “MacBeth.”

More famously, TOS had Spock and Dr. McCoy, who spent three seasons arguing with each other. (TNG tried to duplicate that with second-season Dr. Pulaski and Data, but it didn’t work.) TNG had Data, the android trying to become human, and Geordi LaForge. The quality of the characters and their interrelationships can overcome bad stories (see the third season of TOS); arguably the best thing about TNG, particularly early, was the characters. Even the darker Deep Space 9 featured Odo the shape-shifting security chief and Quark, through whom greed flowed like blood flows through humans.

Others have noted that it was illogical (get it?) for the most valuable officers of a ship to go down to a planet and risk their lives when you’ve got junior officers to do that. Coast Guard cutter captains do not board ships they’re intercepting for whatever reason. But studios didn’t pay William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes and the rest big money to portray someone sitting in a chair while lower-paid actors got to do things, fight and die. (One way to get around that issue is to make the new ship considerably smaller, perhaps like the six-person patrol ship Orion.)

Every Star Trek series to date has been seen through the eyes of its captain, beginning with TOS’ James T. Kirk. The five series have gone through the obvious gamut of diversity, from white males (Kirk and Jonathan Archer of “Enterprise”) to black male (Benjamin Sisko of “Deep Space Nine”) to woman (Kathryn Janeway of “Voyager”) to, well, bald white male with a British accent who is supposedly from France (TNG’s Jean-Luc Picard). It is possible the next captain will be an alien (that is, not from Earth), but for obvious reasons he or she will probably be recognizably human (i.e. Spock the Vulcan).

What are those obvious reasons, you ask? Simple: For the series to succeed, the viewer has to be able to put himself or herself into the shoes of at least one of the major characters. That was, for me, Kirk in TOS, first officer William Riker (because I’m neither bald nor very French) in TNG, Sisko (though, yes, I’m not black) in DS9, and first officer Chakotay (because I’m not female) in Voyager. (For scheduling reasons I didn’t watch that much Star Trek after TNG.) That is probably why the next captain won’t be gay or gender-creative, because as tolerant as someone might be, most people are not gay, and again this series is being viewed by people, some of whom may not be hard-core Trek fans, who see the aforementioned Post comment as just strange.)

Instead of hyphenation diversity, how about we explore intellectual diversity instead? Perhaps the next captain should be, if not an out-and-out cynic, then less of an idealist about the Federation, and a skeptic of whether interstellar democracy can work. (Some have claimed that Star Trek is a lefty’s Utopia in economics, health care for all, gun control, etc. Our captain might point out that there are Federation-member planets where slavery is still legal, and where people are required to commit suicide upon reaching a certain age, as with a TNG episode.) Renegades are more fun to watch if their characters are created carefully.

One reason Kirk was a more appealing captain than Picard was (is? will be?) is that Kirk was a man of action and a man of passion. (I am not referring to Kirk’s alleged womanizing, which in TOS included a woman who tried to kill him, a woman from the 1930s who looked suspiciously like Joan Collins, and two androids.) Picard thought everything through; Kirk did things, whether or not they were always the right things or the wise things. Kirk also didn’t let rules get in the way of doing the right thing, while Picard seemed to do nothing that couldn’t be justified by a Starfleet rule, or violated a Starfleet rule.

Kirk’s character was based in part on British sea captain Horatio Hornblower of C.S. Forester’s novels. (Or perhaps more like the 1952 movie starring Gregory Peck.) An excellent starting point for a new captain would be British sea captain Jack Aubrey of Patrick O’Brian’s novels, similar to Hornblower and Kirk in their ability to compel near-fanatic loyalty among their crew. Wikipedia describes Aubrey (who apparently had a real-life model) and his friend Dr. Stephen Maturin thusly:

Jack Aubrey is a large man (both literally and figuratively) with an energetic, gregarious, cheerful, and relatively simple personality and a deep respect for naval tradition. Remarkable early success earned him the nickname “Lucky Jack Aubrey” and a reputation as a “fighting captain”, a reputation which he sought to retain throughout his career. … Aubrey’s professional life of daring exploits and reverses was inspired by the chequered careers of Thomas Cochrane and other notable captains of the Royal Navy from the period.

Irish-Catalan Dr. Stephen Maturin ostensibly serves as an adept ship’s surgeon on Aubrey’s various commands. … Unlike his action-oriented friend, Maturin is very well educated with several intellectual pursuits. He is passionately fascinated by the natural world,and takes every opportunity to explore the native wildlife of his ships’ ports of call around the world. He is also deeply introspective, and frequently muses on philosophical concepts of identity and self-understanding in his ciphered personal journal. …

Despite their many differences, the pair are invaluable and indispensable companions throughout many years of adventure and danger. Reviewers have compared Aubrey and Maturin to other seemingly mismatched yet inseparable fictional duos such as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in “Don Quixote”, Holmes and Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories, and Kirk and Spock in the original Star Trek TV series.

Logical (Kirk and Spock predated Aubrey and Maturin, who first appeared on the literary landscape in 1969), except that Trek fans think of the Big Three — Kirk, Spock and McCoy, with Kirk’s decisions informed by Spock’s brain and McCoy’s heart. Good characters can make up for mediocre stories or even dubious premises. Bad characters, bad show.

Huge news was reported Monday:

CBS Television Studios announced today it will launch a totally new Star Trek television series in January 2017. The new series will blast off with a special preview broadcast on the CBS Television Network. The premiere episode and all subsequent first-run episodes will then be available exclusively in the United States on CBS All Access, the Network’s digital subscription video on demand and live streaming service.

The next chapter of the Star Trek franchise will also be distributed concurrently for television and multiple platforms around the world by CBS Studios International.

The new program will be the first original series developed specifically for U.S. audiences for CBS All Access, a cross-platform streaming service that brings viewers thousands of episodes from CBS’s current and past seasons on demand, plus the ability to stream their local CBS Television station live for $5.99 per month. CBS All Access already offers every episode of all previous Star Trek television series.

The brand-new Star Trek will introduce new characters seeking imaginative new worlds and new civilizations, while exploring the dramatic contemporary themes that have been a signature of the franchise since its inception in 1966.

So why is this not necessarily good news? Johnny Oleksinski laments:

So when a story on the CBS-run startrek.com popped up Monday with the headline “New Star Trek Series Premieres January 2017,” fans’ brains naturally exploded with excitement. And then we read on.

Everything beneath that beautiful, dreamlike headline was an epic disappointment.

First, “Star Trek” isn’t coming back to mainstream TV. No, Captain — it’s being banished to a doggone streaming service.

Sure, there’s nothing wrong with Netflix, Amazon Prime or Hulu — “Orange Is the New Black” and “Transparent” are terrific shows you can only catch on those services. And I reckon most TV watchers already subscribe to one of them.

But the final frontier is apparently something called CBS All Access. That’s where the new untitled “Star Trek” series will call home, a CBS-only streaming service no one uses that costs users a whopping $5.99 a month.

The pilot will premiere nationally on CBS, but that’s a total tease.

As the viewer and CBS are rounding second base, or second episode in this case, they’ll be forced to shell out $5.99 to keep watching on the platforms CBS All Access is compatible with: Apple TV, Android TV, Google Chromecast, Roku players and Roku TV. (No “Trek” for you, Wii owners.)

With the service, viewers will also be treated to all past seasons of other CBS shows, such as “Two and a Half Men” and “CSI,” a Trojan horse I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies.

And then there’s the chosen executive producer, Alex Kurtzman. Kurtzman’s résumé is packed to the gills with dreadful titles like the reboot of “Hawaii Five-O” and the horrible “Star Trek Into Darkness.”

Over the years, Trekkies began looking to Ronald D. Moore, a former “Trek” writer and creator of the fantastic “Battlestar Galactica” reboot, to bring his signature grit and modern take on sci-fi to a new “Star Trek.” But CBS has instead shackled us with the dude who co-wrote “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.”

Nerd culture has finally escaped after-school “science fiction clubs” and worked its way into the mainstream. Everyone watches “Game of Thrones”; everyone is excited for “Star Wars”; hot guys like comic books.

These are salad days for geeks!

So why does CBS treat “Star Trek” — one of its most valuable and oldest brands — as second tier? Why are these network numbskulls giving “Star Trek” a midseason debut on a streaming service led by the guy who co-wrote “The Amazing Spider-Man 2”?

Captain Kirk wouldn’t stand for it.

The following days have compelled many to throw in their two cents on what the new Star Trek should have, such as Monkeys Fighting Robots …

With six television series, twelve films, and a myriad of books and comics, Star Trek boasts one of the most expansive fictional universes in pop culture, and no matter what path this latest Trek takes, it will have more than enough fascinating material to draw upon. Looking through the possibilities, here are five ideas for a new Star Trek television series.

Captain Worf

One of Star Trek’s most iconic characters, Worf has appeared in more episodes of the franchise than any other series regular. Throughout both The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, the Son of Mogh provided audiences with an operatic personal journey worthy of Kahless himself. With his understated humor and unshakeable sense of honor, Worf remains one of the strongest supporting characters in the history of Star Trek, and some of the most powerful storylines of both TNGand DS9 were those which followed him in his struggle to remain loyal to both the Klingon Empire and the Federation. A Captain Worf series would also allow other great characters from the Prime Reality to return – from TNG luminaries such as Picard and Riker to captivating supporting characters from DS9 like Martok and Garak. Actor Michael Dorn himself has expressed interest in reprising the role.

The Far Future of the Prime Reality

When Star Trek successfully returned to television in 1987, it returned as a new series set one hundred years after the original show. This gave the creators of TNG a wonderfully developed backdrop of established history and ideas to play with, while also allowing them enough room to develop brand new concepts and characters. What worked once could very well work again, and with a past already richly defined by its previous television incarnations, a new series set a century after the exploits of Picard, Sisko, and Janeway could breathe fresh air into the Prime Reality, that is the prime universe in which all of Star Trek prior to the 2009 film was set.

Vanguard

The greatest of all original Trek book series, Star Trek: Vanguard was created by writer David Mack and editor Marco Palmieri back in 2005. This series followed the harrowing adventures of the crew and residents of Starbase 47, also known as Vanguard. Set during the time period of the original series, Vanguard weaved the political and military events of Kirk’s time with an intergalactic mystery that the Vanguard crew were tasked with solving. Mack and fellow series writers Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore created an assortment of characters more nuanced and complex than those found in any other Trek series outside of DS9. Their brilliant character work and engrossing storylines could easily sustain seven seasons of successful television.

Department of Temporal Investigations

Another interesting series from Trek literature is Christopher L. Bennett’s Department of Temporal Investigations, which takes a closer look at time travel in the Star Trek universe. Agents Lucsly and Dulmer and their fellow investigators at DTI are tasked with protecting the space-time continuum from threats past, present, and future. Together they must face devastating temporal incursions, ancient alien technology gone wrong, and the recklessness of Starfleet captains, in what amounts to Star Trek’s version of Dr. Who.

The Mirror Universe

The most iconic of all of Star Trek’s alternate timelines, the Mirror Universe presents not an optimistic future of human courage and cooperation, but rather a universe ruled by the savagery and destructive passions lurking within humankind. Introduced in the original series and expanded upon in DS9, this grim world has yet to be introduced in the New Reality, the timeline in which the new Star Trek film series takes place. A show set in the Mirror Universe of the New Reality could provide Star Trek’s rebooted franchise with an unique television counterpart, and perhaps lay the groundwork for a crossover film set in this dark corner of the Star Trek multiverse.

… and io9, which apparently did a poll, or something:

7) A post-Star-Trek-XI look at the Prime Universe…

We’ve asked you already when you’d like to see the new series set across Star Trek’s vast timeline, and this was by far the most popular choice—and there’s a reason for that. Although JJ Abrams’ Star Trek reboot largely brushed over the universe it left behind, the main continuity of Star Trek (composed of all the TV shows and movies that came before it) after the beginning of that movie is an incredibly interesting place. The Federation is slowly recovering from the fallout of the Dominion War depicted in Deep Space Nine, only to be hit with the galactic catastrophe of the seeming death of Spock and the total destruction of the Romulan and Reman homeworlds, killing billions and leaving countless beings without homes.

This is something that Star Trek Online, the franchise’s official multiplayer online role-playing game, explores in great detail—it’s set in 2409, two decades after the supernova that destroyed Romulus and Remus, and finds the Federation fractured and at war with the Klingons. This isn’t necessarily the path the new series would follow, as the game has no real say on the “canon” of the franchise. But exploring a continuity that has the legacy of past Star Trek TV shows to look back on, especially for a series being launched as part of the franchises’ 50th anniversary celebrations, is an incredibly tempting prospect.

6) … Or The Next Generation of The Reboot

But if the series does have to take place in the alternate reality established by the new movies—what little information we have about the show says it’s not directly related to Star Trek: Beyond, it could still be a part of that universe—essentially pulling a Next Generation could be equally interesting.

It’d leave the movies well in the past and out of the way of the show interfering with them, but at the same time it’d be interesting to imagine and explore what this particular version of the Star Trek universe looks like a century down the line, especially in terms of look and the technology at hand. It wouldn’t have to be a direct parallel to TNG—I definitely wouldn’t want to see an alt-Picard and crew—but something in the spirit of it, about a future crew inspired by the legacy of Kirk and the Enterprise’s five-year mission, would be a fun way to be linked to the movie without having to directly work around them.

5) A New Ship—That’s Not An Enterprise

Okay, before you really string me up, hear me out. The Enterprise and its many incarnations is one of the most iconic features of Star Trek. But like Voyager and Deep Space Nine did in the 90s, it’d be cool to see the show focus around the crew of a different kind of Federation ship.

Voyager was primarily a research vessel. The Defiant was a gunboat made for combat. The new ship could be something like that, or even of a similar size and scope to the Enterprise, which was a sort of jack-of-all-trades—but getting a new ship that’s not just the Enterprise-G or something, with a new design that is evocative of the classic ship rather than a direct emulation would be a way to keep things fresh.

4) More Boldly Going

If there’s one criticism you can level at Star Trek and Into Darkness, its that they focus on being action movies rather than Star Trek’s ideals as a show about communication, exploration, and challenging ideas. And that makes sense for a movie—but those sorts of ideas sit at the very heart of what Star Trek is about, and what makes it so beloved to many people. Some of Star Trek’s best moments haven’t been about battles and conflict, but about exploring and understanding other people.

That’s not to say you can’t have some ship battles some times, but a new series that focuses on that optimism of science and exploration, seeking out bold new worlds and civilizations would be a fitting love letter to Star Trek’s legacy more than an action-focused series. Voyager may not be the most loved or critically-appraised Star Trek show, but its aim of recapturing that sense of exploration found in the original series was a noble one.

3) Lots of weird and wonderful aliens

Star Trek has some iconic alien species—the Klingons, the Romulans, the Vulcans, and so many more. But it also has a slightly mocking reputation for having swathes of races that are little more than humans with a dab of makeup on.

Today we’re living in a world where Television can do much more with effects, both practical and CGI—we have shows like The Flash or Game of Thrones or Doctor Who giving us amazing creations and creatures born from either digital artists or prosthetics masters. It wouldn’t be Star Trek without new aliens to meet, and we’d love to see some truly amazing new species that can stand alongside the show’s icons.

2) A Diverse Cast

Star Trek is no stranger to a diverse cast of main characters. The original series broke boundaries with the addition of Uhura and Sulu to the main . It’s had a Black Captain in DS9’s Sisko, and a Female Captain in Voyager’s Janeway. So some diversity wouldn’t be new—it’d just be carrying on the Star Trek trend.

But there’s still opportunities to shake things up a little. Could we get a LGBTQ bridge officers and Captains? More ethnicities among the humans? Hell, why not more alien crew members? An alien Captain may not be entirely feasible, but it’d be an interesting prospect. As long as the cast as a whole is emblematic of Rodenberry’s original vision for Starfleet, a world where people of all classes, genders, and races were united, it’ll be great.

1) Something Really New

You might have noticed that a lot of the things I’ve focused on here emphasize either doing something new, or adding a new twist to something that Star Trekhas already done. Because even though this new show is being created as part ofStar Trek’s 50th anniversary, above all that it should be adding something new to the franchise.

In an age of Sequels and Reboots, we already have the Star Trek movies being a direct reboot of the original series. That’s all well and good for the films, but a new Trek TV show shouldn’t just be a rehash of series past. If anything, it should keep those series at arm’s length—respect them, love them, reference them, but don’t just retell them. It should be connected, but standalone, just as the shows before it were. We already saw how bad that could be when Star Trek Into Darkness revealed itself as a mild reheat of Wrath of Khan. After so many years of waiting, a new series that just did that for one of the past series would be monumentally disappointing.

I have read the LGBTQ thing brought up in numerous places. I have an alternative suggestion: How about Star Trek evolve to where people don’t identify themselves primarily by their sexual preference(s)? How about Star Trek progress to a place where who you are attracted to is no one else’s business besides your own?

Even the Washington Post got in on the You-Be-the-Next-Roddenberry act:

So it sounds like we’re getting another ship and another crew flying through space at warp speed. But that’s about all we know right now, leaving many of the tough choices about the new series to producer Alex Kurtzman, who worked on the recently rebooted “Star Trek” films. Here are a few of the biggest decisions he’ll have to make, and along with one, big recommendation: Set the new series during the Earth-Romulan War of the 2150s.

When does this “Star Trek” take place?

This is by far Kurtzman’s most difficult call, and the fate of the entire “Star Trek” franchise hangs on it. Kurtzman played key roles in making the most recent “Star Trek” films, which set up an alternate universe that’s separate from the one Gene Roddenberry created in the 1960s featuring William Shatner as Capt. James T. Kirk. It would be totally natural for Kurtzman to want to flesh out this new timeline (in which Kirk is played by Chris Pine). But if he does, he’ll likely disappoint a lot of longtime “Trek” watchers by condemning some of their favorite shows and characters — “Deep Space 9,” Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, et al. — to the historical dustbin. It would be the final nail in the coffin for that timeline, which many people appreciate for its mature handling of race, gender, ethics, economics, politics and foreign policy, among other issues.

Does this “Star Trek” embrace the golden age of television?

By now, TV watchers have shown that they’re willing to commit to season-long plot lines. This is promising for “Star Trek,” a show that did some of its best work when rolling out a two- or three-episode narrative arc. “Deep Space 9” is routinely held up as an example, at times setting the action against a high-stakes backdrop of interstellar intrigue and conflict in the Dominion War. Now is the chance to try that format out in full, telling a single story over 12 or more episodes.

Critics of the recent “Star Trek” films have complained that they reduce the franchise to an action-packed shoot-’em-up. That’s forgivable in a feature film when you have only a couple hours to spin a yarn. But by giving the series more breathing room, television will be the real test of the alternate universe, should Kurtzman choose that timeline. Which leads us to the next big decision.

Is this “Star Trek” dark or light?

The original “Star Trek,” under Kirk, painted the world as a utopia. “The Next Generation” expanded on this by introducing new technologies, such as thereplicator, which explained how humanity overcame hunger and want. But “Deep Space 9” depicted a much grimmer vision of the galaxy, one characterized by war, espionage and subterfuge. Many fans argue that this was when “Star Trek” really shone — and that the next show ought to be an equally gritty and dark spiritual successor.

With 2013’s “Star Trek Into Darkness,” the rebooted universe appeared to take a turn in this direction, offering up themes of conspiracy, betrayal and a thinly veiled critique of U.S. foreign policy. So it’s possible that Kurtzman might further expand on that, exploring the corruption within Starfleet and its struggle to define itself in its earliest years.

What new technologies will “Star Trek” give us?

“Star Trek” isn’t just a venue for discussing politics or religion. It has also inspired many people to become scientists and engineers. Technology from the show has played a pivotal role in shaping our modern-day devices, from the smartphone to the tablet to voice recognition and command software. The big question for the new “Star Trek” is, what kind of technology can Kurtzman introduce into the franchise that will give real-world people something fresh to dream about and tell us something new about the fictional universe?

Herein lies a thorny problem. Kurtzman can’t make reference to the replicator, the holodeck or any of the technologies that show up in “The Next Generation” or subsequent series. Why? Because at our current point in the alternate timeline, these technologies are still in the distant future, if they get created at all, thanks to the disruption in time that led to the events of the 2009 “Star Trek” film.

What the new “Star Trek” should really do

From all this, we look ahead to a few things. First, each episode should be part of a serialized, season-long story, rather than a forgettable standalone episode that tackles a monster of the week.

Second, in keeping with the more serious drama viewers have become accustomed to in other shows, the new “Star Trek” shouldn’t shy away from darker subjects.

Third, perhaps it should consider a setting like the 2150s-era Earth-Romulan War, a period in “Star Trek” history that’s relatively unexplored in the original timeline and completely uncharted when it comes to the rebooted universe (the events that cause the new universe to be created don’t take place until the 23rd century). While a return to the 24th-century world of “The Next Generation” would be welcome, extending the original universe even further, Kurtzman’s real-world connection to the Abrams reboots makes it hard for him to ignore the alternate timeline.

In the Romulan war, Kurtzman has the opportunity to produce new stories in his own style while avoiding divisions in fan loyalty between either universe. The war lends a dramatic backdrop to events that occur to the new ship and crew, gives them a reason to act, and places them early enough in Earth’s spacefaring history that the show’s creators could explore humanity’s initial interactions with other Federation species and the emergence of the Federation itself, along with all the messy politics, economics and diplomacy that implies.

Earth at war, but in the teething years of the Federation, could offer both darkness and light, combining the grim realities of an interstellar conflict with the hope for an enlightened, organized future when security is guaranteed by a galactic alliance of peace-loving people.

What’s more, establishing Romulans as the villain would make the show more accessible to series newcomers, many of whom will remember that it was a 24-century Romulan that served as the principal bad guy in the 2009 Star Trek film.

Prequels carry their dangers. One of the big challenges that “Star Trek: Enterprise” had, as a show that told the story of  Kirk’s forbears, was that it failed to create meaningful dramatic tension. Viewers already knew from watching “The Next Generation” and “Deep Space 9” how things would turn out.

The difference here is that with Kurtzman leading the new “Star Trek” show, viewers can never be truly certain what the future timeline holds. Kurtzman may be perfectly happy to create speculation among fans as to which history he’s really writing for. In this part of the “Star Trek” timeline, Kurtzman enjoys the most creative freedom and the fewest restrictions imposed by canon.

David McElroy wrote this two years ago, and it still applies:

I went to a midnight showing of “Star Trek Into Darkness” Wednesday night and I left the theater with really mixed feelings. There were parts of it that were immensely satisfying in an emotional way. The actors do a dead-on job of recreating the original characters in a way that you’ll recognize.

In many instances, you’ll feel a sense that you really might be watching younger versions of the original characters. It’s not that they look exactly the same. It’s simply that they’ve taken care to interpret the characters in very similar ways. That’s emotionally satisfying if you already know the relationships between the characters in what will be their future.

The biggest problem for me is that these are essentially children who have been placed in senior crew positions of one of Starfleet’s flagships. In the original Star Trek series, we were told there were only 12 starships in the fleet, so we can assume there are no more than that at the point of the new films. (We can also assume there are many smaller vessels.)

Think of the modern U.S. Navy. There are hundreds of ships in the fleet, but there are only 10 active aircraft carriers and three more are under construction. A starship is roughly equivalent to a present-day aircraft carrier.

Now think about this. Can you imagine that a crew of Naval Academy cadets or recent graduates would be handed the keys to an aircraft carrier? Of course not. Young officers serve as junior officers. They get experience. The best of them get promotions and end up in command of smaller vessels and then increasingly important vessels. Eventually, the very best experienced captains in the fleet end up in command of the carriers.

If you look at science fiction books about heroes who end up in command of similar vessels, they all get experience and then move up to bigger jobs. (The Honor Harrington series is a great example.) The fact that Kirk and Spock and Co. end up crewing and controlling the Enterprise when they’re straight out of the academy is an indication that director J.J. Abrams’ conception of life is pretty close to that of my teen self who fantasized himself as the young hero to save the world.

The familiar characters in this series need to be the heroes of the movie. There’s no question about that. But the original Star Trek showed us a number of times that Kirk had a series of commands of lesser ships before he earned the right to command the Enterprise. A reasonable concept for this reboot would have been to put these characters into some small ship or setting that allows them to unexpectedly be heroes.

If Kirk, Spock and Sulu were set up as the young command crew of a 20-person ship that was old and not very important — but they managed to do something important and save the day — it would feel more real and more true to the concept of adult life. Give them increasingly better jobs as they move up successfully through a few movies. Have them longing for the day when they were in command of a starship.

That would feel like a concept for adults. The concept we’ve been given in the reboot is a concept for comic book characters who don’t live in a real world.

To me, things like this remind me all the time that the people who write, direct and produce today’s movies don’t have the life experience that writers and producers used to have.

Star Trek creator and original producer Gene Roddenberry had been a bomber pilot in the U.S. Air Force during World War II, right. After the war, he was a commercial pilot for Pan-Am and then became a police officer for the Los Angeles Police Department while he worked his way into entertainment. When you look at some of the things he injected into his fiction, you can feel the mature experience that comes from having lived a real life outside of entertainment.

What about J.J. Abrams, who is the guiding creative force for the new Star Trek? He’s never worked outside the film industry. He doesn’t have experience with what might seem like real life to the rest of us. He’s a good film director and he knows how to make a pretty film. But his work lacks the adult quality that someone such as Roddenberry brought even to his silliest work.

So what do I think of all this? Stay tuned.